The Exhibition Les Immatériaux: Interdisciplinarity, Epistemology, Curatorial Subjects

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Andreas Broeckmann
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 460267843

The projects contributes to the historiography of exhibitions by taking the exhibition Les Immatériaux (Paris, 1985) as an example for addressing questions on the epistemology of exhibits, on curatorial agency, and on interdisciplinarity in research networks. The project takes up current debates on the relationship between materiality and immateriality, on subjectivity and objecthood, and confronts them through an historical case study. Les Immatériaux constitutes a prime example for interdisciplinary exhibition concepts and marks a crucial moment in the emergence of contemporary discourses on media and materiality, whose urgency is testified a.o. by current debates on Artificial Intelligence, ecology, and the life sciences. Since the exhibition has so far not been given adequalte attention, the project closes some of the research gaps in the existing research and makes a major contribution to the methodology of an art-historically based, interdisciplinary historiography of exhibitions.The project looks, firstly, into the exceptional, interdisciplinary character of Les Immatériaux. It investigates the status of the exhibition proper – on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in spring 1985 – in relation to the long-term research project about "new technologies, materiality and creativity" that was ongoing at the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) of the Centre Pompidou since 1981. To this aim, an in-depth study is conducted of the network of institutions and individuals which was developed by the curator and design theoretician Thierry Chaput and his team. A focus is placed on the critical analysis of the position of the curator, or the "curatorial subject," which for Les Immatériaux is mostly ascribed exclusively to the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, even if Lyotard himself frequently insisted on the collaborative and open process in which he was cooperating with Chaput's team and others. The project, secondly, researches the epistemological status of the exhibited objects and artworks. The main hypothesis is that these exhibits don't simply illustrate a curatorial concept, but that they supersede what has been conceptualised theoretically, and that they even actively contribute to the conceptual development of the exhibition. These considerations are developed through a series of analyses of exemplary exhibition sites and exhibits, and discussed in the context of current thing-theoretical and neo-materialist debates.Thirdly, the project strives for the integration of Les Immatériaux into the history of exhibitions. A comparison with other historical exhibitions shows the distributed and plural character of curatorial agency, especially in interdisciplinary exhibition projects at the crossroads of art, science, and technology. Thus the project develops conceptual and methodological approaches to the description, analysis and comparison of historical exhibitions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants